Python complaints

[Markus Stenberg]

Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com> writes:
> James Logajan wrote:
> > Oh yeah? Well yer mudder wears army boots! Seriously though, the price I am
> > talking about has absolutely nothing to do with simplicity. It has to do
> > with the fact that languages such as Java that have "true" GC are
> > non-deterministic in their execution times because GC can cause execution
> > pauses in the VM at unpredictable times. This makes Java unacceptable for a
> > large number of real-world applications that I have been involved in lately.
> > ("I'm sorry, but your 911 call can not go through for another 20 seconds
> > while our Java VM garbage collects 1GB of memory on the switch.") I have
> > recommended Python over Java in at least one environment because of Python's
> > deterministic approach to memory management. Had Python not had that, I
> > suppose we would have gone with some other scripting language or even
> > designed our own (gak!).
> Garbage collectors have got a *lot* better since the days when
> GC meant half-second pauses waiting for the machine to sweep
> through all its memory. Let alone 20 seconds.

Where can I admire such a beast? At least none of the Java
implementations(*) I have tried(**) have one. say, for 128MB of trash, it's
consistent N second sweep (0.5-10, depending on hardware).

> -- 
> Gareth McCaughan  Gareth.McCaughan at pobox.com
> sig under construction

(*)
	HPUX JVM, Linux Sun/IBM JVM, Windows Sun JVM

(**)
	I could have tried harder. Yes. But I'm hoping for clues here <0.5wink>
-- 
The IBM Principle:		  
	Machines should work.  People should think.
The Truth About the IBM Principle:
	Machines don't often work, people don't often think.